Apollo Missions Driving Moon Lander Design at NASA

The Apollo missions marked a turning point in human history. They changed the political climate of the day, made many tech advances possible, and inspired future scientists and astronomers the world over. But it turns out they’re also having a far more practical effect: acting as a guiding light for future lunar missions.

NASA’s next-generation Orion spaceship–scheduled for first launch in 2015–may look a lot like the Apollo craft in use 40 years ago. But as Space.com reports, the similarities are often just skin deep–and also draw from the Shuttle program as well. “The computing power of modern electronics just dwarfs what [Apollo engineers] had available,” Jim Geffre, a NASA engineer working on Orion, said in the article. “That allows us to do a lot more and build more automation into the spacecraft. More performance that uses less power and less space allows us to build in redundancy that Apollo didn’t have.”

The Orion is also about four feet larger in diameter–16.5 feet, to the Apollo craft’s 12.8 feet–which will enable four astronauts to travel to the moon instead of three, let all four descend to the surface (instead of just two), and allow for missions that run several weeks long. (Image credit: NASA)